Orange's political pendulum stops swinging

This will go down as the year Orange County's swing between Republicans and Democrats finally came to a stop and landed on the left.

Orange is no longer up for grabs.

We now look an awful lot like Palm Beach County — one of the state's most heavily Democratic-leaning counties — but 10 degrees colder in the winter and no ocean view.

Last week's election confirmed what many have seen coming for much of the past decade: The increase in voters who are either Hispanic, young or both is dramatic.

" 'Dramatic' is an understatement," Orange County Republican Party Chairman Lew Oliver said.

OK, then: epic.

Tuesday, President Obama won Orange County with 59 percent of the vote, about the same as in Palm Beach.

That wasn't all.

Alan Grayson won his congressional seat with 63 percent. Newcomer Karen Castor Dentel ousted incumbent Republican state Rep. Scott Plakon. Joe Saunders, one of two openly gay members of the state House elected this year, won by 12 points against his GOP opponent. Linda Stewart buried former legislator Bob Brooks.

The Democratic fever spilled all the way down the ballot to the constitutional offices, where longtime and well-respected Republican Property Appraiser Bill Donegan was unseated by no-name Democrat Rick Singh.

Orange County was once the epicenter of the I-4 corridor in the middle of the largest swing state.

Now Orange appears frozen in the D column among the other counties along Interstate 4 that have more potential to sway from R to D.

Orange became a minority-majority county several years ago, with non-Hispanic whites making up just 46 percent of the population today. The number of Hispanics in Orange County surged by more than 83 percent in the past decade, and today they make up 28 percent of the county.

And the number of voters registered as Democrats has ballooned as well. Orange County hasn't gone for a Republican presidential candidate since it picked Bob Dole in 1996, and even that was only by about 500 votes.

The number of registered Democrats in Orange has grown by 97 percent since then to 295,833, creating a nearly 92,000-voter advantage over Republicans.

People such as Luis Ortiz, who opened Dabeni's Latin Restaurant & Bakery with out-of-this-world pastelillos, are part of the reason Democrats have such a solid lead.

Ortiz, who opened his restaurant on Michigan Avenue two years ago, voted for Obama.

"I've always been a Democrat," he told me. "When there is a Democrat, I vote for them."

And that's an obstacle for Republicans, an influx of people who aren't just Democrats, but loyal and unbending like last century's FDR Democrats.

Further complicating the math that once allowed the GOP to view Orange as potentially winnable is the exploding bastion of young liberals in the eastern section of the county — more specifically, the University of Central Florida.

UCF's enrollment has nearly doubled in the past decade to more than 59,000 students. The corridors along University Boulevard and Alafaya Trail look a lot like Gainesville or Tallahassee, with shopping plazas filled with bookstores, bars and tanning salons.

Aaron Gadomski, a 20-year-old international-affairs major from Tampa, said he saw a few Mitt Romney T-shirts and stickers on campus, and even that, he said, "was more than I thought it would be."

Destanie Hoppe, who is 19 and studying nursing, was one of those in the minority. She voted for Romney, but some of her roommates waited in line at the campus precinct for more than four hours to vote for Obama.

Needless to say, she was severely outnumbered at an Election Night watch party with her friends.

"I had to leave the room," she said.

Lew Oliver shares her pain.

"It's normal and rational and logical to expect students to vote for Democrats," he said. "They have their hand out, and they need cash, and Democrats promise to give it them in about 55 different ways."

C'mon, Lew. That's a bit of an overstatement, isn't it?

And that's politics. It's all hyperbole and rhetoric.

That brings us to the biggest lesson for the GOP last week: Orange County's (and America's) shifting demographics — including 51 percent women in Orange — just won't stomach the fringe.

Republicans who care about their party will stop putting up with it, too. No more talk about "legitimate rape." A more-open attitude on immigration. And zero tolerance for indefensible ads such as one that compared Castor Dentel, a teacher from Maitland, to convicted Penn State child molester Jerry Sandusky.

Both of the mainstream parties have lost a bit of ground in Orange and elsewhere along the I-4 corridor since 2008 to people registered without a party affiliation.

But the independents appear to have broken this time around with the Democrats, and they were likely pushed that way by the fringe.

Now the GOP is left to try to push them the other way against a current of changing demographics that make Orange a long-term stronghold for the D's.